Results for “food” 1949 found
The idea of the “food desert” is fading
Poor neighborhoods, Dr. Lee found, had nearly twice as many fast food restaurants and convenience stores as wealthier ones, and they had more than three times as many corner stores per square mile. But they also had nearly twice as many supermarkets and large-scale grocers per square mile. Her study, financed by the institute, was published in the March issue of Social Science and Medicine.
From another paper:
Dr. Sturm found no relationship between what type of food students said they ate, what they weighed, and the type of food within a mile and a half of their homes.
Here is much more.
Albuquerque and Santa Fe and Gallup food bleg
Where should we eat? In Albuquerque I am most interested in green and red chili. Any place between the cities would be a useful recommendation as well.
I thank you all in advance.
Some food notes from Mexico City
My favorite sandwich (ever) is the Hawaiiana, at “Tortas Chapultepec,” turn left out of the front of Hotel Camino Real in Polanco, and it is on the corner at Victor Hugo and Mariano Escobedo. They usually are open by 9:30 and I suspect they close fairly early.
Pujol does wonderful things with vegetables and is perhaps the best fancy place to try; I recommend the Menu de la Tierra.
They have done away with the food stalls at the Zócalo. In Mexico City calorie-counting menus are common and gelato is being replaced by frozen yogurt (!).
Tres Marias is a “food village” right off the highway on the way to Cuernavaca. Look for the place on the southbound side which specializes in green chilaquiles and also chorizo tacos, but in general standards along that strip are remarkably high.
Here is the most important food advice for Mexico.
Overall, Mexico City is becoming a safer city, and compared to four years ago one sees many signs of economic progress.
My new food account on Twitter
It is mostly “food only,” but a few other things too. Feel free to follow, and please do spread the word if you can. My normal tweeting will continue at @tylercowen as well.
Victorian street food
Victorian street food was a huge industry. In the north you would find tripe sellers; I remember the one in Dewsbury market that sold nine different varieties of tripe, including penis and udder (which is remarkably like pease pudding). Another popular street food was pea soup with, according to where you lived, either pig’s trotters or bits of ham chopped up into it. Peas boiled in the pod and served with butter were similarly popular. Stalls known in my youth as whelk stalls also sprang up, selling jellied eels, whelks, winkles and prawns, all by the pint or the half-pint. You could splash a bit of vinegar on them and eat them at the stall or take them home with you.
That is from the new and excellent A History of English Food, by Clarissa Dickson Wright. This book also offers up a good deal of confirming evidence for Paul Krugman’s prior hypotheses about English food.
How American food got so bad
Here is a podcast with me, interviewed by Stephen Dubner. Excerpt:
I think there is a very bad period for American food. It runs something like 1910 through maybe the 1980’s. And that’s the age of the frozen TV dinner, of the sugar donut, of fast food, of the chain, and really a lot of it is not very good. If you go back to the 19th century and you read Europeans who’ve come to the United States, they’re really quite impressed by the freshness and variety that is on offer.
I attempt to explain how this came about, in the podcast and in one chapter of my forthcoming book An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies. Believe it or not, a lot of the blame can be placed on government, including Prohibition and immigration restrictions. The book is due out in April, in both physical and e-copies, and it’s the longest and most comprehensive book I’ve written (yet without the price being high).
By the way, am I a food snob? I told Dubner:
Let me just give you a few traits of food snobs that I would differ from. First, they tend to see commercialization as the villain. I tend to see commercialization as the savior. Second, they tend to construct a kind of good versus bad narrative where the bad guys are agribusiness, or corporations, or something like chains, or fast food, or microwaves. And I tend to see those institutions as flexible, as institutions that can respond, and as the institutions that actually fix the problem and make things better. So those would be two ways in which I’m not-only not a food snob, but I’m really on the other side of the debate.
The fight to liberate food trucks
The Institute for Justice, a self-described “libertarian public-interest law firm,” launched its new National Street Vending Initiative early this year in Texas and has since expanded it to Atlanta (where city officials had decided to reserve all public property for a single vending company) and Chicago (where aldermen have proposed rules so severe, they could cut off vending in the entire downtown area). The institute even released a report, “Streets of Dreams,” which reviews vending regulations in the country’s 50 largest cities, including Washington.
Here is much more.
Yana requests a Moab food bleg
She is there for a few days, and would like to know where to eat. She has very good taste in food, too.
Banerjee and Duflo on poverty and food
It is an excellent piece, excerpt:
The poor often resist the wonderful plans we think up for them because they do not share our faith that those plans work, or work as well as we claim. We shouldn’t forget, too, that other things may be more important in their lives than food. Poor people in the developing world spend large amounts on weddings, dowries, and christenings. Part of the reason is probably that they don’t want to lose face, when the social custom is to spend a lot on those occasions. In South Africa, poor families often spend so lavishly on funerals that they skimp on food for months afterward.
And don’t underestimate the power of factors like boredom. Life can be quite dull in a village…
We often see the world of the poor as a land of missed opportunities and wonder why they don’t invest in what would really make their lives better. But the poor may well be more skeptical about supposed opportunities and the possibility of any radical change in their lives. They often behave as if they think that any change that is significant enough to be worth sacrificing for will simply take too long. This could explain why they focus on the here and now, on living their lives as pleasantly as possible and celebrating when occasion demands it.
Hat tip goes to half of the people I follow on Twitter.
Food Safety and Culture
Scientific American has an excerpt from Myhrvold, Young and Bilet’s magnum opus, Modernist Cuisine, in which they discusses the often arbitrary, subjective and culturally bound nature of “food safety” rules and practices.
In decades past, pork was intrinsically less safe than other meats because of muscle infiltration by Trichinella and surface contamination from fecal-borne pathogens like Salmonella and Clostridium perfringens . As a result, people learned to tolerate overcooked pork, and farms raised pigs with increasing amounts of fat—far more fat than is typical in the wild ancestors of pigs such as wild boar. The extra fat helped to keep the meat moist when it was overcooked.
Since then… producers have vastly reduced the risk of contamination through preventive practices on the farm and in meat-processing facilities. Eventually the FDA relaxed the cooking requirements for pork; they are now no different than those for other meats. The irony is that few people noticed—culinary professionals and cookbook authors included….
After decades of consuming overcooked pork by necessity, the American public has little appetite for rare pork; it isn’t considered traditional. With a lack of cultural pressure or agitation for change by industry groups, the new standards are largely ignored, and many new publications leave the old cooking recommendations intact.
Clearly, cultural and political factors impinge on decisions about food safety. If you doubt that, note the contrast between the standards applied to pork and those applied to beef. Many people love rare steak or raw beef served as carpaccio or steak tartare, and in the United States alone, millions of people safely eat beef products, whether raw, rare, or well-done. Beef is part of the national culture, and any attempt to outlaw rare or raw steak in the United States would face an immense cultural and political backlash from both the consumers and the producers of beef.
…Cultural and political factors also explain why cheese made from raw milk is considered safe in France yet viewed with great skepticism in the United States. Traditional cheese-making techniques, used correctly and with proper quality controls, eliminate pathogens without the need for milk pasteurization. Millions of people safely consume raw milk cheese in France, and any call to ban such a fundamental part of French culture would meet with enormous resistance there….
Raw milk cheese aged less than 60 days cannot be imported into the United States and cannot legally cross U.S. state lines. Yet in 24 of the 50 states, it is perfectly legal to make, sell, and consume raw milk cheeses within the state. In most of Canada raw milk cheese is banned, but in the province of Quebec it is legal.
One point they don’t note is that there may be multiple equilibria–that is, it may be more dangerous to produce raw milk cheese in a country or region without a history of producing raw milk cheese than elsewhere. Still, this is no reason we shouldn’t be eating more horse.
Comali foods: tamales and pupusas from El Salvador
They sent me, gratis, non-frozen tamales from El Salvador. They sell pupusas too, and with improved technologies:
The retort process uses a combination of heat and pressure to “sterilize” the foods, which are sealed in special pouches similar to military MRE’s (but ours taste a lot better 🙂 ).
They were excellent (I knew immediately when I smelled them) and no artificial preservatives are required. They will deliver to your door and their web site is here. I am told there is a 30 percent off discount with use of the code TCowen30; I receive no kickback.
Don't forget the white sour cream.
Why is hospital food so nutritionally bad?
Mario Rizzo asks me:
Why is hospital cafeteria food so poor from a nutritional point of view? Fried chicken, preservative-filled cold cuts, cheese everywhere, etc. Keep in mind I am not talking about the food served patients who may have appetite problems. It is food they serve everyone else including doctors and nurses, many of whom know better.
You'll find some proximate answers here, referring to the institutional arrangements for supplying the food. Here is a UK discussion. Here are some signs of progress. I would make a few more fundamental points:
1. Few people choose a hospital on the basis of the food or on the basis of the food their visitors can enjoy. Furthermore the median American has bad taste in food and the elderly are less likely to enjoy ethnic food or trendy food. You can't serve sushi. They are likely to use the same food service contract for the patients and the visitors.
2. For the patients, some of the food is designed for the rapid injection of protein and carbohydrates. For a terminally ill patient who is losing weight and wasting away, this may have some benefits. Since healthier people tend to have very brief hospital stays, they can undo the effects of the fried chicken once they get out. Many of the sicker patients in for longer stays have trouble tasting food properly at all.
3. Taxing hospital visitors is one way of capturing back some of the rents reaped by patients on third-party payment schemes.
4. I would be interested to know more about the insurance reimbursement rates for hospital food, but at the very least I suspect there is no higher reimbursement allowed for higher quality. Combine third party payment with a flat price for rising quality and see what you get. Furthermore, low quality food is another way the hospital raises its prices to inelastic demanders, again circumventing relatively sticky reimbursement rates from the third party financiers. It's one sign that the net pressures are still in inflationary directions.
5. You can take the quality of the food as one indicator of the quality of other, harder-to-evaluate processes in the hospital.
Strategic food attack at functions
Here is more on the optimal use of buffets, especially for Indian food:
At Sharadha’s wedding too I had managed to spot and exploit arbitrage opportunities. For example, I realized that people never stood in queues to get second helpings, and that I could peacefully get around the line by taking the plate from the hardly-crowded salad counter and then going to the main line looking like I was going for second helpings.
…And if you find yourself at a buffet which has lots of financial traders, I really pity you.
The previous link on the topic was here. For the pointer I thank Karthik Shashidar.
GMU needs food truck deregulation
Maksim Tsvetovat writes to me:
I'm a fellow professor at Mason Fairfax Campus. As I was reading about Sodexo monopolist hold on food service at Mason and their despicable labor practices and working conditions, I started wondering if there was a way to deal with this WHILE improving food options on campus. The answer is actually pretty simple — FOOD TRUCKS! I can almost taste the fresh tacos and arepas, or bahn mi, or udon noodles or… you name it.
This worked very well on the campus of my alma mater (Carnegie Mellon Unviersity) where food trucks coexist peacefully with Aramark but forced Aramark to improve quality of food, lower prices and improve labor practices (they were not happy about it and sued but lost in court — there's good precedent)
I'm talking to owner of one tasty taco truck to see if he'll come and park near Enterprise Hall at lunchtime — just as a trial balloon, to see how Mason reacts. I'm wondering if you (as a well-known local authority on ethnic food as well as a fellow professor) might be able to lend your voice to this and rally some support behind it. Even a simple blog posting would be a huge help!
Here is Matt Yglesias on DC food cart deregulation. Here is a good piece on black and grey market food on the other side of the Anacostia River. Here is the latest on food trucks in DC.
Elephant Jumps, Thai food in Merrifield
8110 A Arlington Blvd, Falls Church, 22042, (703) 942-6600, in the Yorktowne Center, more on Gallows than Route 50, home page here.
Home-style Thai food, with four levels of spicy, culminating in “Thai spicy.” It’s not as good as Thai X-ing, but it’s probably better than any other local Thai competitor. They will watch you sweat and they will giggle.
Here is one good review of the restaurant. Here is a short bit on how elephants were viewed in antiquity. Here is my favorite book on elephants.
After we exchanged impressions of the other local Thai restaurants, the proprietor said to me: “You know a lot about food and you get around — you should be a food critic. You could write up what you think about all these places!”
If we’re not going to have much more economic growth, we can at least have a few locales like this.